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Sept. 25, 2017 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
21:05
Trump Vs The NFL - The Right To Protest

President Trump has waded into the NFL controversy by suggesting that the football players who do not stand for the US national anthem should be fired. Is this an issue of First Amendment versus patriotism? Or there is something else...? **Note: we are having problems live streaming the program. Hope to return to normal schedule soon.***

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NFL Demonstrations Debate 00:08:50
Hello, everybody.
Thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today is Daniel McAdams, our co-host, Daniel.
Good to see you.
How are you, Dr. Paul?
Good.
Good.
I imagine you watched a few football games over the weekend, and I don't know whether you tuned in to the demonstrations or not, but it certainly got the news.
I don't know who was playing, what was happening, and there was a lot of attention to something else.
And of course, that's this whole thing, the big fight, the big fight between Trump and the NFL and what the players are allowed to do.
And Kaepernick, you know, months ago or a year ago, you know, stirred this up that he was going to use this as a political forum.
And I think what he decided not to do was not to stand, you know, for the national anthem.
And it raises questions, you know, exactly what this means.
A lot of people immediately defends them, say, right of free speech.
First amendment right.
He's just demonstrating.
He has a cause, you know, this sort of thing.
And other people have different opinions.
But then the president gets involved.
The president comes up and he has strong, strong opinions.
And he, you know, wants to be a little more authoritarian on this.
And then he wanted to instruct the owners on what to do.
And then he bashed the people who were demonstrating.
I don't think it's quite that simple because, you know, over the years, sports have been used for resistance.
You know, back in the Vietnam War era, I was always very impressed with Muhammad Ali Cassis Clay because he hated the Vietnam War, stood up to it, and suffered the consequences from this.
But it was done, to me at that time, I sort of saw it as standing on principle in a very dignified manner.
You know, he didn't go out and start a riot in the street or things like that.
But it was very strong.
And even Martin Luther King hated the Vietnam War.
And some people claim that he might have been assassinated over his position on the war.
So these are very, very strong things.
But I'm not quite sure if I can find something in this demonstration that's going on that is in the same category.
And it raises some questions.
And I'm sure you have thought a little bit about this subject.
I think President Trump getting involved kind of raises it to a whole new level.
This had been simmering, as you point out, for quite some time, for at least a year or so.
Started with Colin Kaepernick.
But the president entering into it, saying anyone who doesn't stand for the anthem doesn't love our flag and should be fired immediately, and if they don't do it, then you should boycott football.
That takes us to a whole other dimension.
I have mixed feelings, though.
I felt sort of good when he was tweeting against the NFL and making fun of these guys because at least he wasn't tweeting against Kim Jong-un and threatening war.
To threaten these poor NFL guys and to threaten a nuclear war.
You know, there was a vote that I had to cast shortly after I went back into Congress, probably in 99 or so, that there was a big pitch on there to have a Trump position, quote, punish people who would burn the American flag.
And because it does annoy people.
People like to think good of their country and you have your flag and it's easy to stir up patriotic feelings.
And although mine might be different, I don't get put out about what other people think about.
But the amendment came up and said that there would be strong punishment by the federal government if you burn the American flag.
And the big question is, if you don't like that, can you express yourself and say the reason and you can't be annoyed about it is one thing.
But then when you get the federal government involved and talk about punishment, they were talking about punishments for burning the flag.
And it's really easy to galvanize support.
Of course, it was not an easy political vote for me, but I voted against that amendment because to me, it was a right to speak out.
And still, I haven't put this exactly in the same category, what's going on now with NFL, in the same category as burning a flag, but some people emotionally may see it the same way, that if you turn your back on the flag, it's equivalent to burning it, and we have to punish you for it.
And that just raises more questions about civil liberties.
I think that's what we want to try to delve into a little bit in today's program, the false dichotomy between free speech and patriotism.
In America, people seem to be divided on one side or the other.
You're in favor of the players exercising their free speech, or you're a patriotic American.
And I think, as we talked about before the show, they're missing the point.
Yeah, I think one point that they miss is the fact that, you know, the NFL and the military have a close association.
Literally, the NFL has been militarized, and they have become more aggressive.
And those in the libertarian camp quite frequently, you know, questions about overly avert patriotism when it comes to the flag maybe symbolizing the wars that we're in.
Maybe you want to suggest that true patriotism means we shouldn't be going to these wars.
But all of a sudden, there's this alliance between government and government money where they advertise on there, and all of a sudden it has changed.
The attitude has changed several years back.
And as much as I believe we should respect the flag and our country, you know, there's something about military always being at the football game and a flag as big as the football field.
And I understand that it hasn't been forever that they played the national anthem at football games.
It sort of came along when they have to build up this, you know, super strong support for military to justify the wars they're doing.
Subtly, that's what they're doing.
If you can praise the military and thank you for their service and never ask you, what was your service?
Oh, I went over and killed a bunch of people, you know, and I bombed somebody over there, even though they didn't do any harm.
They never raised that question.
But they worked this in, and I didn't like what the NFL was doing with their allegiance to the patriotism.
So they're really in the middle right now, you know, of this squabble because some of them were sympathetic to Trump, and then he steps over the boundaries, and they say, well, we have to back off.
But I don't like this symbiosis with our federal government actually providing money to the NFL.
Well, I think the military realized many years ago that particularly football, but other sports as well, but football has the feeling of the clash of titans.
People watch the game, they get excited, they yell, they feel themselves very excited.
The military recognized that and utilized taxpayer money to exploit that to get new recruits, more people into the military, to increase so-called patriotic feelings, which we would argue actually are pro-militaristic feelings rather than patriotic.
And it turns out that the owners did it.
I know this is going to shock you.
They did it for the money.
Oh, my goodness.
And this is one of the few times we're going to praise McCain, so this show should be catalogued.
But in 2015, Senators Flake and McCain went down there and they had a study showing that the Defense Department had spent millions and millions of dollars for on-field demonstrations with the players.
Because prior to 2009, it was very uncommon for players to be out on the field during the national anthem.
They'd be In their locker rooms, and they would play the song, and then they would come out and play the game.
But the military saw this as an opportunity to bring these guys on the field and really have a big display.
And so they gave millions of dollars to the NFL.
The DOD spending, all military branches spent about $53 million on pro-sports marketing just between 2012 and 2015.
Listen to this, though, on NASCAR.
They spent upwards of $100 million, including $88 million just on Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s car.
$88 million to propagandize, to militarize professional sports.
And that comes much closer to crony capitalism, you know, and fascism when you see that connection.
But it's also propaganda.
I think it's war propaganda so often.
So we have the demonstrators out there now.
And if you had libertarians out there demonstrating, they probably wouldn't do it because they would think about property rights.
But we want to talk a little bit about what were they demonstrating against.
Property vs. First Amendment 00:10:59
And you can sort it out.
Every single one that has kneeled and participated in it, we don't know exactly what they're thinking.
But Kaepernick and some other, when you listen to what they say, they're not very close to being like Muhammad Ali and Martin Luther King opposing a war.
I don't think that's what it is.
But it's injustice.
That is good.
And there's one part of it.
I agree 100%.
Maybe not with the way they're complaining.
But we've talked a lot about the injustice in our judicial system against minorities when it comes to the treatment of the enforcement of our drug laws and the number of people in our prisons.
Of course, the big problem there are the drug laws, but there's not justice in the system either.
But that is one thing, but I don't think that's what they were talking about because they were the image that I got, and I may be wrong on this, but the image I got, they were much closer to Black Lives Matter, you know, because they weren't talking as a nonpartisan libertarian person, you know, for real justice and property rights and these sorts of things.
So I think it was closer to that, and they argued more about, you know, the problem with, there's a lot of poor blacks out there.
Of course, there's a lot of rich blacks too, and blacks have been present in the United States.
So that is one thing.
But they complain about this, and they should, but it's not so simple because I think they talk about social justice and this sort of thing.
And that is, you know, confrontation.
And Trump says it, you know, and he says it for a reason, that he doesn't want to be seen.
And I don't think he was.
This is not about racism, racism.
But, you know, Black Lives Matter, the logic seems like that that is racism.
I mean, they use pretty strong terms, racial terms, but that's not what they're talking about here.
And if they truly, and we've talked about this a lot, if they truly care about poor people and the suffering of minorities, they should look to the economic system, you know, and read Walter Williams and listen to individuals like that that will explain why there's poor people.
And it's not going to be solved by superficially, you know, aggravating a lot of people over what you should do with during the time that the national anthem is being sung.
And I do know libertarians that personally object to some things in the national anthem and they think that the superpatriotism and the flag and what they do with football,
to me, I think it's sort of the subtle justification that what the military does cannot be wrong and it's the conditioning for the American people and the people who aren't into politics, the ones who go to football games, to support war.
To me, they come up to me and they thank me for my service in the military during the 1960s.
That's the last thing I need to hear.
You know, I think if anything, they should challenge me.
Why weren't you more outspoken against it like Martin Luther King was?
So that is, that to me is a big problem.
So we're saying essentially that a lot of their hearts are probably in the right place, but they're kind of missing the point.
We talked about it earlier the issue of the drug war and how that affects minority populations more.
What about things like the Federal Reserve?
It would be great to have a conversation with Mr. Kaepernick and a few of the others about how the Federal Reserve System impoverishes minority communities through the printing of money, through the hidden taxes of the inflation tax and others.
You know, there's a curl there, but they need to watch the Liberty Report.
Yeah, there you go.
Now, I think the biggest issue here is the whole issue of the First Amendment.
Because some people say, well, they have a First Amendment right.
They have a right to do this.
It's not quite so simple.
We have a First Amendment right to be able to broadcast here, and we have a First Amendment right to keep somebody out of here from barging in because we own the property.
So it's property and First Amendment rights saying things.
So the question comes, well, who then is responsible if this is going over the top?
And if this is entertainment, and the people who are producing the entertainers, supposedly they were independent and they weren't owned by the government and getting funds from the government, they might say, well, the owners have something to say about it.
Now, this might not be exactly the right analogy.
But I was thinking that, you know, I was in obstetrics for a long time, and I happened to be a right-life doctor.
So what if I hired somebody and after they got to working for me, their main job was to talk to patients and advertise and pass out flyers on why this is how you get an abortion and promote the whole cause of abortion.
Well, disregarding the right and wrong of that issue, I'm the owner of the clinic and, you know, I have a right.
It's not their free speech to do this.
So the owner of the football team really is responsible.
If they want to do it and ignore it all, then still, if people object, there's a wonderful example to it.
It's a libertarian answer.
Martin Luther King used it and it's still being used frequently, maybe more so now, and that is boycott.
And I understand that a few people might boycott.
Trump gets behind the boycott, but that doesn't sound right.
I mean, because he also threatens people.
But I think the only kind of boycott that really works is spontaneous.
And people say, look, we're tired of this.
We want to go and watch football.
We don't want to listen to this stuff.
And I think the point has been made that there was a time when the ball players didn't attend the National Anthem.
They stayed in the before all this occurred.
They didn't even come out until afterwards.
It's relatively new, you know, that this whole issue, and it's because of the DOD money.
But, you know, you're right.
The whole problem is solved with property ownership.
You think of someone like Kraft who owns the Patriots, he tends, I think he's a conservative.
I think he was a Trump supporter.
He may tell his employees, you are going to stand for that anthem or else.
And there may be some other liberal owner who says, it's up to you.
And if the liberal team, if the liberal owners team, if people don't support it, then he's going to take a hit in his pocketbook and he may change his policy.
That's true across the board.
And if the market is there and the people get freedom of choice, the market will speak because they'll say, I don't like what you're doing.
I'm not coming to your games.
And they can boycott it.
But, you know, we're trying to make the point that property is so important in sorting out this problem.
But I think all civil liberties can be worked like that.
What about religious liberty?
Nobody can walk into the church that we might attend.
We have certain beliefs and go in there.
I want equal time to preach atheism.
Everybody knows you can't do that.
It's the property.
What about sexual freedom?
That should be property.
You can't come into my house or my bedroom and tell us what to do.
And it should be that way in all commercial transactions, even stores, even restaurants.
That's where you really raise the ire.
But then again, what if you ever stepped your bound and put up stupid signs and said, oh, we only want Hispanics because we're a Mexican restaurant?
That'd be stupid.
And the market would take care of that so fast.
But property, understanding property, it sorts out all the civil liberty arguments.
One reason why we get in a lot of trouble in education is the government runs education.
You know, they run the universities, they get their money, there's public education, and you worry about the dress codes and activities and which groups can meet.
And it gets all into it because they don't have the principle of private property.
The problems that exist in public schooling, they don't exist, you know, in private schooling.
And usually the discipline is different.
You usually don't have anything near public schools with drugs.
It's just a different story.
So if somebody wants to really understand the freedom message, understand what personal liberty is all about, they have to understand property and volunteerism and voluntary contracts.
And that solves a lot of our problems.
If people would just think of it in a simple way, you know, President Trump was telling the owners of a private owners of a business, your employees must stand for the national anthem.
Imagine if Trump tomorrow told us that we have to stand and have the national anthem before we do the show.
It's absurd.
People would laugh at it.
You know, and over the years, I did a lot of boycotting, but I never told anybody I was boycotting because I couldn't stand to go and listen to the state of the union messages.
And I didn't want to be the guy down there.
You are.
I can stay at home and complain about it.
But then the briefings, there were times when some of the wars were roaring, and I was in such strong disagreement with our president, you know, pursuing this.
I would not take the invitation, you know, to go and listen to a briefing at the White House.
But that was my own personal thing.
I didn't go to the media, but that was the way I reacted personally.
But there's still ways to do it.
Like you said, Jess, the owners can design what the players will do.
And if they don't accommodate the public, then the public will speak too.
Yeah, indeed.
So go ahead and summarize your assessment of all this and where it's going.
Well, I guess it's sort of personal.
I love football.
I played it in high school.
I wasn't very good, but I played it.
I love the game.
And I just think it's sad that all aspects of our lives have to be so politicized and militarized.
It used to be you turn on a game, you have some snacks, you just enjoyed.
It wasn't any of this.
I wish we could go back to those times.
Yeah, and that raises the subject and thinking in terms of what's going on in foreign policy.
I keep thinking, you know, there's really not much reason for any potential war any place in the world.
And yet there's always some aggravation.
It's like we create problems.
And then socially, we seem to create problems too.
Out of bias and bigotry, it comes out.
Misunderstanding of economics, that poor people are poor because it's a racial thing, not understanding why sound money and limited government and low taxes would help solve a lot of these problems.
That so many of these problems can be solved with the issue of liberty.
People Thrive on Liberty 00:01:01
But anyway, the people just seem to thrive on it almost.
And unfortunately, we have a current leader of our country who likes to stir the pot.
What would he do if he couldn't do this?
But it's so unnecessary.
Now, this little battle that's going on, it doesn't look as significant as we tried to make it on the philosophic issue, but it's not quite like the problem of stirring up trouble with Korea, North Korea, and the threats and intimidations and marching up to their borders and dropping bombs and our militarism around the world.
Now, that is major.
That's what I'd like to see a few people stand up and a few owners say, no, we don't want the military and the government paying us money, but we stand for peace because that is where we should be.
And maybe we could enjoy our football games a lot more so.
I want to thank everybody for tuning in today to the Liberty Report.
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